WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES AHEAD
The first thing that all prisoners were greeted with when they arrived at the gates of their camps were large holding rooms. In these rooms, they were stripped of all possessions they were allowed to bring, their heads were shaved completely, they showered in one large communal shower, and had numbers imprinted their arms. That number was their new identity. They were no longer people, they were merely items at this point.
The camps that all of the prisoners had to live in were past the point of inhumane. The obvious infestations of rats, diseases, and bugs were not even the half of it. Prisoners were forced to live in barracks that were built on uneven, wet ground and had up to 700 in each barrack. Prisoners were given a breakfast, lunch, and dinner, although it was not enough to sustain the health and physique needed for the harsh labor they were put through.
On top of already being treated like animals, the people taken in were also experimented on. People were put in compression chambers, joined together, split open, submerged into freezing waters, and poisoned all for the sake of "science". Twins were tested on to see the effects on the other person. Women's wombs were injected with chemicals to see how it would react. They were not human in the eyes of their captors, but merely experiments.
Writing this page was incredibly difficult, for obvious reasons. Looking at these pictures is heart breaking. You don't look at them and see a random person, you look at them and see someone with a family, dreams, hopes, and a life worth living. And the most tragic part is, is that you know what happened to them. It's inevitable for all the pictures you look at from the Holocaust. Facing that truth is what really hurts.
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"Sachsenhausen: Conditions in the Camp." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 29 Jan. 2016. Web. 05 May 2016.
"The Nazi Doctors." The Nazi Doctors. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2016. <http://www.auschwitz.dk/doctors.htm>.
"Sachsenhausen: Conditions in the Camp." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 29 Jan. 2016. Web. 05 May 2016.
"The Nazi Doctors." The Nazi Doctors. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2016. <http://www.auschwitz.dk/doctors.htm>.